The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

138 Pages Posted: 17 Mar 2012 Last revised: 17 May 2014

See all articles by Chitu Okoli

Chitu Okoli

SKEMA Business School

Mohamad Mehdi

Computer Science, Concordia University

Mostafa Mesgari

John Molson School of Business, Concordia University

Finn Årup Nielsen

Technical University of Denmark - Informatics and Mathematical Modeling

Arto Lanamäki

Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen

Date Written: October 24, 2012

Abstract

Wikipedia has become one of the ten most visited sites on the Web, and the world’s leading source of Web reference information. Its rapid success has inspired hundreds of scholars from various disciplines to study its content, communication and community dynamics from various perspectives. This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. We describe our detailed, rigorous methodology for identifying over 450 scholarly studies of Wikipedia. We present the WikiLit website (http wikilit dot referata dot com), where most of the papers reviewed here are described in detail. In the major section of this article, we then categorize and summarize the studies. An appendix features an extensive list of resources useful for Wikipedia researchers.

Keywords: Wikipedia, systematic literature review, encyclopedias, Web 2.0, social media, online collaboration, mass collaboration, information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, ontologies, open content, Creative Commons, motivations, online culture, Web references

Suggested Citation

Okoli, Chitu and Mehdi, Mohamad and Mesgari, Mostafa and Nielsen, Finn Årup and Lanamäki, Arto, The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia (October 24, 2012). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2021326 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2021326

Chitu Okoli (Contact Author)

SKEMA Business School ( email )

Grand Paris Campus
5 quai Marcel Dassault, Suresnes
Paris, 92150
France

HOME PAGE: http://chitu.okoli.org/pro

Mohamad Mehdi

Computer Science, Concordia University ( email )

1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1MB
Canada

Mostafa Mesgari

John Molson School of Business, Concordia University ( email )

1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8
Canada

HOME PAGE: http://johnmolson.concordia.ca/en/graduate-programs/phd-program/phd-students/1911-mostafa-mesgari

Finn Årup Nielsen

Technical University of Denmark - Informatics and Mathematical Modeling ( email )

Asmussens Alle, Building 305
DK-2300 Lyngby, DE Copenhagen DK-2300
Denmark

Arto Lanamäki

Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen ( email )

PO box 7802
Bergen, 5020
Norway
+4794892099 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://uib.academia.edu/ArtoLanam%C3%A4ki

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